I would like to build a nondeterministic monad transformer in haskell that, I believe, behaves differently from ListT and from the alternative ListT proposed at http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/ListT_done_right. The first of these associates a monad with a list of items; the second associates a monad with individual items but has the property that monadic actions in given element influence monadic elements in subsequent slots of the list. The goal is to build a monad transformer of the form
data Amb m a = Cons (m a) (Amb m a) | Empty
so that every element of the list has its own monad associated with it and that successive elements have independent monads. At the end of this post I have a little demonstration of the kind of behavior this monad should give. If you know how to get some variant of ListT to give this behavior, that would be helpful too.
Below is my attempt. It is incomplete because the unpack function is undefined. How can I define it? Here’s one incomplete attempt at defining it, but it doesn’t take care of the case when the monad m contains an Empty Amb list:
unpack :: (Monad m) => m (Amb m a) -> Amb m a
unpack m = let first = join $ do (Cons x ys) <- m
return x
rest = do (Cons x ys) <- m
return ys
in Cons first (unpack rest)
Full (incomplete) code:
import Prelude hiding (map, concat)
import Control.Monad
import Control.Monad.Trans
data Amb m a = Cons (m a) (Amb m a) | Empty
infixr 4 <:>
(<:>) = Cons
map :: Monad m => (a -> b) -> Amb m a -> Amb m b
map f (Cons m xs) = Cons y (map f xs)
where y = do a <- m
return $ f a
map f Empty = Empty
unpack :: m (Amb m a) -> Amb m a
unpack m = undefined
concat :: (Monad m) => Amb m (Amb m a) -> Amb m a
concat (Cons m xs) = (unpack m) `mplus` (concat xs)
concat Empty = Empty
instance Monad m => Monad (Amb m) where
return x = Cons (return x) Empty
xs >>= f = let yss = map f xs
in concat yss
instance Monad m => MonadPlus (Amb m) where
mzero = Empty
(Cons m xs) `mplus` ys = Cons m (xs `mplus` ys)
Empty `mplus` ys = ys
instance MonadTrans Amb where
lift m = Cons m Empty
Examples of desired behavior
Here, the base monad is State Int
instance Show a => Show (Amb (State Int) a) where
show m = (show . toList) m
toList :: Amb (State Int) a -> [a]
toList Empty = []
toList (n `Cons` xs) = (runState n 0 : toList xs)
x = (list $ incr) >> (incr <:> incr <:> Empty)
y = (list $ incr) >> (incr <:> (incr >> incr) <:> Empty)
main = do
putStr $ show x -- | should be [2, 2]
putStr $ show y -- | should be [2, 3]
Thanks.
Update: An example of why LogicT doesn’t do what I want.
Here’s what LogicT does on the simple example above:
import Control.Monad
import Control.Monad.Logic
import Control.Monad.State
type LogicState = LogicT (State Int)
incr :: State Int Int
incr = do i <- get
put (i + 1)
i' <- get
return i'
incr' = lift incr
y = incr' >> (incr' `mplus` incr')
main = do
putStrLn $ show (fst $ runState (observeAllT y) 0) -- | returns [2,3], not [2,2]
I believe you can just use
StateT. For example: